


The Magic Position

by Saucery



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Adolescence is Both Awkward and Awful, Adolescent Sexuality, Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angry Birds, Birds, Boarding School, Bonding, Class Differences, Comedy, Companionable Snark, Crack, Familiars, Fluff and Crack, Friendship/Love, Funny, Idiots in Love, M/M, Magic, Magic School, Magic-Users, Military, Opposites Attract, Plotty, Pseudo-History, Psychic Bond, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Romantic Friendship, Sarcasm, Self-Esteem Issues, Sexual Tension, Slow Build, Soldiers, Sorcerers, Surreal, Swords & Sorcery, Talking Animals, Teenagers, Training, Tsukishima Is An Actual Angry Bird, Wizards, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 13:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2230467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saucery/pseuds/Saucery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boys are dumb. Magic is occasionally embarrassing. Familiars are <i>always</i> embarrassing. And warriors are nothing without wizards to back them up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Magic Position

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve always wondered what Tsukishima would do if he was a bad-tempered, crabby familiar stuck watching over idiots like Hinata and Kageyama. So, er, he’s a bird in this story.
> 
> Yes, you heard right. A bird. A very unpleasant bird. That snarks a lot. And still manages to be adorable, the fucker.

* * *

 

The Karasuno Training Academy was renowned for maintaining the highest standards in military training. Arguably, those standards weren’t very difficult to maintain, because only the best of the best got through its rigorous entrance requirements, anyway.

For students aiming to be warriors, the primary requirements were mental and physical strength, adeptness at multiple forms of martial arts, and the adaptability to develop their own distinctive fighting style in combination with a partner’s. And for the magically inclined, the primary requirements were raw natural power, scholastic excellence in the magical theory examinations, and the ability to establish a stable bond with a warrior.

After all, it was widely known that warriors and wizards fought in pairs, and the success of each pair depended on the wizard bonding with the warrior so deeply that they instinctively moved as one in the midst of a battle, as though they occupied a single body. The warrior was responsible for guarding the wizard’s back while the wizard concentrated on spells, and the wizard, in turn, was responsible for defeating the enemy magically, in addition to healing the wounds inflicted on the warrior during combat. Together, they were practically invincible.

According to legend, the first king of the Karasuno kingdom had accidentally bonded with his chief sorcerer when the castle was attacked, and their bond had saved the king’s life as well as the lives of every citizen, because the opposing Nekoma army had been waiting for the successful assassination of the king prior to progressing with their assault. They never made it past the city gates, because the king had survived and launched an attack of his own.

Since then, the entire Karasuno army was composed of warrior-wizard pairs, and many surrounding kingdoms, such as Dateko and Tokonami and even Nekoma itself, had adopted the practice, themselves. While the warrior-wizard battalions were much smaller in numbers than old-fashioned, non-magical armies, they were several times as effective.

And so it was, upon a midnight not-so-clear (seriously, it was cloudy as heck), that a diminutive young wizard named Hinata Shouyou disembarked from the carriage that had borne him from his humble village to the monolithic giant of a building that was the Karasuno Training Academy.

Upon dismounting and paying his fare, Hinata looked up at the curved tower that gleamed like an ivory tusk in the night. He looked up, and up, and up. And up some more. And a bit more after that.

Now, Hinata was shorter than almost any human alive, so he was accustomed to looking up, but this was ridiculous. His neck had a crick in it. He knew better than to crack it, though, because if he did, he’d get scolded by—

“Don’t you dare do that ghastly cracking you do with your neck,” chirped the golden-feathered, mean-eyed bird on Hinata’s shoulder. “It makes you look like something out of _The Exorcist_.” (It had been a terrifying puppet-show that had toured their village last month.)

“I haven’t done it, yet!”

“ _Yet_ ,” intoned the bane of Hinata’s existence. “I have you pegged, brat.”

Kei was Hinata’s familiar, and, true to his role, was overly familiar with every aspect of Hinata’s existence, from the fact that Hinata wet the bed until he was eight to the fact that, at fifteen, he tended to pop boners with inconvenient regularity.

Hinata mostly pretended that his privacy wasn’t in a constant state of being breached, and Kei mostly _failed_ to pretend that Hinata didn’t drive him up the wall. They struck a tenuous balance that, strangely enough, worked for them. Well. For definitions of ‘work’ that included ‘a continuous and uncomfortably accurate commentary on Hinata’s inner life’.

The trunk containing Hinata’s meager belongings floated along behind him as he climbed what appeared to be millions and millions of stairs. He was panting after fifteen minutes of getting nowhere.

“What the…?” Hinata peered at the stairs, which wavered in front of him.

“It’s a futility shield, you moron,” said Kei. “Which you’d know if you had a brain larger than the size of a pea, but—”

“That’s rich, coming from you! What’s the size of _your_ brain in that tiny little skull?”

“My brain’s bigger than yours!”

“Um, excuse me?” said somebody, and Hinata glanced up at the door to the tower, which was suddenly directly before him instead of an eternity of steps away. It was ajar, and the moonlight was bright enough to make out the sheepish expression on the face of the sleepy, bespectacled man standing in the doorway. He was somewhat on the short side, too. Hey, maybe there were lots of short guys in the academy, and Hinata wouldn’t feel so puny, any longer.

“Nah, you’re still a freak,” Kei whispered, reading Hinata’s thoughts as usual, but Hinata ignored him.

“Hello!” Hinata beamed at the stranger. “Thanks for opening the door! And, uh, taking down the shield, I guess? Whew, that was quite a climb!”

“I am _so sorry_ about that,” said the man, who, upon closer inspection, was wearing a wizard’s cloak. Its trailing sleeves nearly hid his wringing hands. “The rest of our students arrived earlier today—or was it yesterday? Gosh, it’s after twelve—and we put the shield up after sunset, like we generally do. I hadn’t realized we had another student due! I really should have taken attendance!”

“Er,” said Hinata, scratching behind his ear. “It’s not your fault that I was late. My village is at the border, so it took ages for the acceptance letter to get to me, and even _more_ ages for me to get here.”

“What you just said is so grammatically incorrect that it physically pains me,” Kei bemoaned.

“Shush, Kei.” Hinata stuck out his hand. “I’m Hinata Shouyou!”

“Oh,” said the man, faintly, staring at Kei. “ _Oh_. A familiar. So you’re the prince’s—oh. How could I forget?” He shook Hinata’s hand. “I’m… I’m Takeda Ittetsu. I teach sorcery.”

Kei considered him keenly. “The prince’s what?”

But Master Takeda only ushered them in. “Come in, come in. You must both be tired. Since your… roommate is asleep, Hinata, and it would be exceedingly rude to disturb him, I’ll have you sleep in a guest room. We’ll move you to your shared quarters tomorrow morning, so you can introduce yourself and unpack your luggage. Is that all right with you?” Takeda enquired, anxiously. “Staying in a guest room?”

“Any place with a mattress sounds wonderful to me,” Hinata fervently assured him.

“And a mattress protector,” Kei added, snidely.

“A mattress protector?” Master Takeda blinked, closing the grand wooden door behind him, and raising the shield with a complicated, ritualistic gesture.

“D-don’t mind him!” Hinata said. “I haven’t had that problem for years, but he likes making fun of me for wetting my bed when I was—er.”

Kei cackled gleefully. “You exposed _your own secret!_ Ha! Kid, you slay me.”

“I _will_ slay you. Literally,” Hinata threatened, but Kei kept cackling all the way to the guest room.

The passages were lit with sconces that flickered on at their approach, and flickered off once they’d passed. Tapestries came to life as Hinata gaped at them, gilded threads twisting sinuously within the fabric, giving the impression of stags prancing in verdant forests, and mermaids swimming in jewel-blue seas. They, also, stilled as the trio passed.

Magic was so commonplace, here. Back in his village, Hinata had been the sole wizard, and while he’d been treated like he was special, he hadn’t actually enjoyed it. He’d always dreamed of attending Karasuno, of making friends just like him, or at least meeting people that weren’t intimidated by him. It was fortunate that he’d had Kei at his side for the magical theory exams, helping him answer those weird, abstract questions about the balancing of the elements, the gravitational orbits of the stars and the mathematical ratios of herbs in certain potions, or Hinata would have failed. Spectacularly.

“Stop gawping like a country hick,” Kei admonished, although he sounded kind of impressed, himself.

“But I _am_ a country hick,” Hinata said, and Kei snorted.

“Good point.”

Master Takeda unlocked a smaller door into a spare room filled mountains of empty, rolled-up parchments that barely left enough space for a miniature cot, but as Hinata sort of _was_ miniature, he didn’t mind. Master Takeda seemed vaguely embarrassed, though, and apologized for the inconvenience.

“Again, I’m sorry about this,” he said, “but we’ve been using the guest rooms to store supplies, and students tend to need blank parchments to do their homework on. This is the comfiest room, believe it or not; the chamber with the laundry powder would have you sneezing throughout the night.”

“No, this is great!” Hinata floated his trunk in and set it down next to the scrolls, careful not to squash them and ruin their perfect, cylindrical shapes. “I can’t wait to meet my roommate!”

“I’m… sure he feels the same,” Master Takeda said with a watery smile, and bid them goodnight.

“He’s acting fishy,” said Kei, when the teacher was gone. “He uses ellipses whenever he talks about your roommate.”

“Elli-what?” Hinata asked.

Kei huffed in frustration. “He pauses when he talks about your roommate, okay? That’s what it means. Takeda’s absent-minded for an official instructor, but his pauses were deliberate. I’d think your roommate was the prince, given what Takeda let slip, but the thought of you being partnered with royalty is so bizarre that I can’t imagine it. And I have a prodigious imagination.”

“You just like using words I don’t understand,” Hinata complained, and Kei rolled his eyes, abandoning his perch on Hinata’s shoulder and flapping over to an empty candle-holder, onto which he settled.

“I keep hoping that my intelligence will rub off on you. So far? No such luck.”

“Ugh. Shut up, already.” Hinata yawned, collapsing onto the cot, which creaked mournfully. Gods, he was knackered. “M’gonna sleep.”

“Finally, a course of action I can agree with.” Kei fluffed his feathers and tucked his head under his wing.

The lone sconce lighting the room snuffed out with a flick of Hinata’s fingers.

 

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from [>this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFI9s6INJPQ) delightful Patrick Wolf song.
> 
> Oh, and Tsukishima is a [Golden Parakeet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_parakeet).
> 
> Up next: Hinata discovers that his roommate is a dick (and a prince), and that having a familiar is pretty rare. As in, only the most powerful wizard in the land gets to have one. Whoops?

**Author's Note:**

> Like my writing? Want updates and sneak previews? Follow me on [Tumblr](http://saucefactory.tumblr.com/)!


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